20090428

Israeli President Shimon Peres is confirmed to appear at the 2009 AIPAC Policy Conference beginning Sunday 3 May. In addition, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will speak to conference delegates via satellite. Dozens of exciting speakers and top policymakers have also been confirmed, including Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who will kick off this year's conference with a tribute to the U.S.-Israel relationship.

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, House Republican Whip Eric Cantor, Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin and Republican Whip Jon Kyl have also been confirmed-the four leaders will join hundreds of their congressional colleagues and foreign dignitaries in a celebration of the U.S.-Israel alliance during the Policy Conference Gala Banquet. Senator John Kerry, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and Newt Gingrich, former speaker of the House, have also been confirmed for this year's conference.

(by Scott Jenkins) In Chris Hedges' "American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America" he argues that the Christian fundamentalist movement emerging today in the United States resembles the early fascist movements in Italy and Germany at the beginning of the last century, and therefore constitutes a gathering threat to American democracy.

"Pulitzer prize–winner Chris Hedges charts the dramatic and disturbing rise of a post-literate society that craves fantasy, ecstasy and illusion.

Mr. Hedges argues that we now live in two societies: One, the minority, functions in a print-based, literate world, that can cope with complexity and can separate illusion from truth. The other, a growing majority, is retreating from a reality-based world into one of false certainty and magic. In this “other society,” serious film and theatre, as well as newspapers and books, are being pushed to the margins.

In the tradition of Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism and Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, Hedges navigates this culture — attending WWF contests as well as Ivy League graduation ceremonies — exposing an age of terrifying decline and heightened self-delusion."

U.S. envoy to the Middle East George Mitchell warned Israel's Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman and President Shimon Peres against attacking Iran--as China Confidential yesterday predicted. Mitchell's warning was so strong that Peres was compelled to publicly speak out against the military option.

The Obama administration is abandoning Israel in the hope of not only appeasing but actually striking a so-called grand bargain with nuclear-arming, Islamist Iran. Important administration members, including Gates, believe Iran can control Afghanistan and counter Pakistan if that country collapses.

In contrast with recent U.S. administrations, the Obama administration does not see Israel as a strategic ally. At best, Israel is viewed as a troublesome friend in need; at worst, a liability. Obama's close adviser, National Security Council member Samantha Power (who called Hillary Clinton a "monster" during the 2008 Presidential campaign) is in the Israel-is-a-liability camp. Echoing a left-wing, European viewpoint, she regards Israel's establishment as a mistake.

Having failed to contain Iran, the United States is concentrating on restraining Israel.

Administration contingency plans include condemnation of Israel, support for a United Nations Security Council resolution that could include sanctions on Israel, and suspending or seriously cutting military aid to the Jewish State.

The big question is how the Obama administration would react if Iran retaliated against Israel indirectly as well as directly--by making good on its repeated threats to attack U.S. forces in the Middle East and shut down the strategic, 29 mile-wide Strait of Hormuz, through which an estimated 20% of the world's crude oil is transported by tanker ships. Would the U.S. fight back with real ferocity or respond in a limited way while blaming Israel for preemptively attacking Iran and appealing to "the Muslim world" for "understanding?"

20090401

The inauguration of Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud-led coalition government brings a long-needed corrective lens onto the jaundiced mainstream-media view of the global Jihad. Israel's new Foreign Minister, Avigdor Lieberman, has announced the new government's strategy of putting the onus of progress on the Arabs' fulfilling their long-unfulfilled obligations toward peace - before Israel makes any further concessions.

Melanie Phillips quotes extensively from "The Two - State Solution is 87 Years Old," an article by Victor Sharpe in the American Thinker, March 29. It is a superb and important piece, as she says, detailing Britain's long record of betrayals of the Jewish people and appeasement of Arab demands -- and even now, jihadist demands grow ever more shrill, and Western politicians prepare to betray Israel yet again in another round of appeasement, with Obama and company acting as if the "two-state solution" has never yet been tried, when it is the only thing that has ever been tried.

Phillips concludes:

It is only if the true history of the Middle East is understood that certain things become inescapably clear: the scale of the monumental lie that has been so assiduously promulgated about the nature of this dispute, a lie which is now generally assumed in the west to be true and which is driving the genocidal hysteria against Israel; the fact that the fundamental cause of this tragic impasse was the repeated British appeasement of Arab terror, illegality and injustice, a policy which continues to this very day; and the immorality and absurdity therefore of believing that today's ‘two-state solution’ – which among other things means that the ‘progressives’ who support it thus support the ethnic cleansing of all Jews from the putative state of Palestine – would be anything other than a Final Solution for the Jews of Israel, not to mention an incalculable victory for the forces waging war against the free world.

The reality of the Arabs is one of defeat, hitting rock bottom... We are defeated, politically and militarily... and economically, socially, and even psychologically. We have a discourse of conspiracy, and we blame everything on others. (Watch on MemriTV via courtesy of Israel Matsav).